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Sunday, 25 June 2017

This is the first in a series of an as yet undetermined number of instalments, covering my trip to Portugal in early April. A slight change of pace from the usual restaurant reviews and scathing pieces of social commentary but I hope you enjoy them all the same.Portugal's national epic, Os Lusíadas by Luís Vaz de Camões, is an grand poetic tribute to the Portuguese voyages of discovery of the 15th and 16th Centuries. Those voyages were the foundation of the first of the great European maritime empires, their leaders bearing the names of legend: Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan...

Now I'm not suggesting for a moment that I should be mentioned in the same breath as Camões, just noting that this humble series of instalments takes me the other way. Me, a native of one of the realms that Camões' contemporaries "discovered" for the glory of Empire, travelling in the reverse direction to discover for myself the land of the sons of Lusus, the descendants of Bacchus: Portugal.